1. Field of the Invention
This invention generally relates to stuffed footwear and, more particularly, to an inflatable stuffing for insertion into, and removal from, footwear, as well as to a method of removably stuffing footwear.
2. Description of Related Art
When not worn, shoes are often stuffed with shoe forms to maintain their shape and resist wrinkling of the material constituting the upper shoe part. Shoe forms utilizing tension springs, or outwardly-acting biasing clamps, or bags filled with particulate filler are well known and are used by consumers, typically in a home and especially to maintain the shapes of expensive shoes or boots fabricated of leather and like light, thin materials.
Although the known shoe forms are satisfactory for their intended purpose, they are not generally employed to stuff shoes prior to their purchase primarily due to the prohibitive cost of the shoe forms. Shoe manufacturers that produce shoes in mass production typically stuff their shoes with multiple wads of crushed paper, which serves to maintain the shoe shapes during transport to retailers, and sometimes even during display at the retailers.
The stuffing of shoes with paper, however, has not proven to be altogether desirable. Foremost of all concerns is the cost of labor involved not only in initially stuffing each shoe, but also in removing the multiple wads of paper therefrom. At the manufacturing end, a multitude of crushed paper wads represents a non-negligible fire hazard. At the retailing end, the removed crushed paper wads are unsightly and must be discarded, thereby raising waste disposal concerns.
It is known to ship handbags, duffle bags, luggage and like soft-walled non-self-supporting bags with inflated inserts of generally parallelepiped configuration. Such bags have wide, usually zippered, openings commensurate in length with the length of the inflated inserts so that the inserts can be readily bodily inserted into the wide openings of such bags. In shoes, however, and especially in boots, the foot opening is much smaller than the length of the shoe and, hence, box-like inserts cannot be used to stuff shoes because the inserts would not reach the front toe part of the shoe.